The black Citroën rattled across the paving stones of the Pont Saint-Michel, over the mercurial waters of the Seine flowing darkly below, through the stream of cars and carts fleeing southward. Beside me, Massu hummed tunelessly to himself. Meanwhile, I was nauseously remembering the cadaver I’d just seen, and Madeleine too. For Vennet’s murder corroborated the most improbable of Madeleine’s delusions: that someone at the Baudelaire Society—Coco Chanel, no less, or some hired proxy—was killing people, and gouging out their eyes, as part of some ancient vendetta between them that I could never quite understand. And if Madeleine’s tales were true, I was suddenly neck-deep in a sordid affair that I barely understood, in a city where I was persona non grata. What was worse, I was now in the hands of the police, the very people I most needed to avoid. Luckily, I’d left the derringer hidden in my apartment.

The police car lurched left onto the Quai des Orfèvres, swerving through an arched entranceway and heaving to a stop in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, headquarters of the Police Judiciaire, which investigated all of Paris’s homicides. In the middle of the courtyard a large fire was burning while several men stood by with trolleys. One of the men was stoking the fire, and from the shade of the early afternoon sparks rose into the patch of blue sky above. I was led inside, through a gloomy maze of corridors and stairwells to a room where I was fingerprinted and photographed. My notebook was confiscated. Then I was marched across the building, up more stairs to the top floor, through a commotion of voices, typewriters, and ringing telephones, and instructed to wait outside an office marked Brigade spéciale N° 1. Occasionally someone would enter or leave the office, and I would catch glimpses of a large smoky room filled with desks facing each other, each with a typewriter on it. Men milled about purposefully, or sat at one of the desks, typing with two fingers. There was a smell of burning paper mixed with tobacco and body odor. I must have sat there for an hour or two, fretting at this unexpected turn of events, smoking Salomés while my heart thudded painfully in my chest. Now that I was a guest of the judicial police, my main goal was to avoid ending up in the hands of the secret police. I was counting on the famous interdepartmental hostility of the French police. With any luck, I thought, I might still walk out of here a free man.